December 24, 2024 • 24 mins
Wayne Resnick fills in for Bill Handel all this week. It’s a private prison bonanaza. The California job killer that wasn’t. China spying in Los Angeles Hacked!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
If there is OKF I AM six forty live everywhere
on the iHeart Radio app, It's the Bill Handle Show.
Wayne Resnik in for Bill. Some of the stories we're
following for you here at KFI. La County health officials
say they have identified the first human case of bird
flu in La County. The person who has it has
(00:29):
mild symptoms. They are recovering at home. They're giving them
some anti virals, so it's not it's not a super
emergency situation for that person, thank goodness.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They also say this.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Person got the bird flu from livestock at his work
site that had the bird flu. It is jumping from
animals to people, folks. I don't know if it's panic
time yet.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's not panic time yet. Also, high surf also not
panic time. High surf warnings hiatt surf advisories in effect
all along the coast Ventura down through Orange County. The
National Weather Service says you're gonna see waves as high
as twelve feet at the beaches in La and OC
(01:12):
and up in Ventura. Oh boy, eighteen feet. Some waves
may hit that height that is too high to be
around in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
But no need to panic.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Just don't go to the beach or even just stay
you know, stay away from where.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
The water's crashing on the shore. That's all.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Now, everybody loves money, and when a business sees an
opportunity to make a lot of money, they get very
excited and they start making plans to make all of
that wonderful money. And in this case, the business is
the private prison industry. And the reason that they believe
(01:56):
that they're going to start to make a lot of
money is because we have a new administration coming in
in January and the President elect, Donald Trump has said
he is going to undertake mass deportations, and mass deportations
means big money for private prisons because the Feds have
(02:17):
to put him somewhere until they deport them. Now, it
is true that this is something Donald Trump said before
his first term that he was going to deport tons
of people, and he did deport I mean, he didn't
do it, but you know what I'm saying. Under his administration,
they deported about nine hundred and thirty nine hundred and
forty thousand people less than under the Obama administration, Although,
(02:43):
and I'm not going to lie to you, I can't
figure out if these numbers reflect a four year term
for Obama or all eight years, because it would not
be fair to take eight years of one president and
compare it to four years of another president. But in
any event, it is it is low more than the
net number of Obama deportations, but way more than the
(03:05):
current president.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And so.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Even if it doesn't reach the numbers that President elect
Trump is thinking about right now, it will likely be
an increase over what we've been seeing, and that means
more business for the big private prison companies like Geo Group,
which runs a bunch of private detention facilities all over
(03:32):
the place, and they had an earnings call recently where
the executive chairman of the Geo Group said that this
was an unprecedented opportunity.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And that they are gearing up.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
They are bringing beds online that currently are not, they
are looking at hiring a lot more staff. I wouldn't
be surprised if for the next couple three years, private
prison work becomes an employment growth industry. And they're not
the only one. There are other companies that do this.
(04:07):
I think Geo is probably the big daddy. I mean
they currently right now they're holding forty percent of all
ICE detainees, so they don't have a majority market share,
but they may have a plurality market share. They say
they already have enough empty beds that they could spin
(04:27):
up services there and bump up the number of people
that they hold in custody, and that this could lead
to over four hundred million dollars in additional annual revenues. Also,
GEO owns a company called BI Incorporated.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I worked with not four. I worked with BI.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Briefly for a time a long time ago when they
were starting the first electronic monitoring unit here in Los
Angeles under the federal courts, and I worked on that unit,
and we contracted with BI for services. They they hold
a contract for the electronic monitoring of people awaiting court dates.
(05:14):
So GEO has their hands in keeping people in prisoned
pending deportation. They also have their hand in monitoring people
who are waiting for court dates to find out if
they're going to be deported or they're going to get
to stay, or if they're going to get a green
card or whatever's going to happen. So they really there's
(05:36):
a lot of money for them to make. There's some
other companies that are very excited, like core Civic is
the other It's like Coke and Pepsi. I think Geo
is Coke, core Civic is Pepsi. In the world of
private prisons, they're saying essentially the same thing. We have
unused beds that we can bring online very quickly. We
can hire more people pretty quickly. And I guess to
(05:59):
show that he is serious about doing this, President elect
Trump has said he will issue emergency orders that will
allow these private prison operators to hire people more quickly,
speed up the background check process because right now it
can take up to six months, and also to streamline
(06:20):
the normal competitive bidding process for these contracts. So they're
gonna do it, They're gonna do it quickly, and those
people are gonna get rich, no doubt.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
All Right, let's talk about it.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
We've been living with the twenty dollars an hour fast
food worker minimum wage in California. So let's see how
many jobs were killed and lost since that went into effect.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Hi, will can you hear me typing? Actually there are.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
There are more jobs in the fast food industry in
California since the twenty dollars an hour minimum wage passed.
I remember, and you probably remember, and if you were
listening to KFI, it was talked about a lot. When
that law was signed Abe twelve twenty eight. There were
stories of gloom and doom for the industry. For example,
(07:20):
you may remember a franchisee of Pizza Hut, a group
that owned one hundred They still do own hundreds of
Pizza Hut locations. They said, we will lay off every
single one of our in house delivery drivers because of this.
There was a guy who owned like one hundred and
(07:40):
twenty or something Burger Kings. He said, I'm gonna have
to cut everybody's hours and I'm gonna have to start
putting in more of those self service kiosks because of this.
Rubios they said, we're gonna have to close like fifty
stores because of the rising cost of doing business in California.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Now in Rubio's is an.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Interesting case because at the time that they said that
that we're gonna have to close forty five fifty stores
because of the rising cost of doing business in California,
their biggest expense was their debt payments. Because they were
acquired by private equity firm. Private equity is almost always evil,
(08:27):
so that's a little disingenuous, but nonetheless that was the
tone of the news coverage in the wake of the
passage of the twenty dollars an hour fast food minimum wage.
Then it went into effect and in April, I believe,
and then after it went into effect, this group called
(08:53):
the California Business and Industrial Alliance, they took out an
ad in USA Today Full paid saying we've lost ten
thousand jobs. Okay, I was actually they actually they put
(09:15):
out that ad right after the beginning of a normal
yearly cycle for fast food jobs. The fact of the
matter is fast food jobs are seasonal, and jobs go
away starting around June. They go away again right around now,
(09:42):
and then they come back and that has happened.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
That happens over and over. It's a cycle.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So if you use raw numbers you can get a
misleading result. If you use seasonally adjusted numbers. During this period,
actually five thousand jobs were gained. Now, the Hoover Institution,
which is a think tank, they're very free market, so.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
They don't like minimum wages.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
They say they looked at unemployment data starting from when
the law was signed through the end of the year
and that a bunch of jobs went away. But then
it was pointed out that they were not using seasonally
adjusted numbers, and they and this is why I bring
this up, because it's one thing for me to say
(10:37):
they said ten thousand jobs went away, but that wasn't true.
But it's another thing when they retracted their post and
admitted that they blew it. So even they ended up saying, oh, yeah,
we didn't do it the right way, the fair way.
(10:59):
Then came another group called the Employment Policies Institute, which
happens to be run by a guy who's a big
lobbyist for the restaurant industry, who said, hey, let's look
at January twenty twenty four and see what happens with
employment because of this law. And oh, jobs went down.
(11:22):
But remember I just told you there's a seasonal cycle
in place. If that person had picked September of twenty
twenty three, when the law was signed, for example, to
then look, or if they had picked April of this
year when it took effect, guess what, then it would
have shown that jobs had gone up. So you can
pick and choose obviously, how to put out information to
(11:46):
have it to have it put forth the conclusion that
you want, but that doesn't mean that your conclusion is
really the fair or accurate one. So is there some
way to know for sure what raising the minimum wage
does to jobs? Not really, because it's actually very complicated.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You know a lot of economists go.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Who's just beth. If you raise the wage, you gotta
pay people. You can't afford to have as many people
who are But here's the thing. If you look at
all of the studies that have been done in the aggregate,
what you find is an increase in the minimum wage
(12:29):
doesn't really have much of an effect. In some cases
there is some job loss, but it's not catastrophic. In
other cases, jobs go up. How can this even be
if it's such simple math. Well, because there's a flip
side to paying people more. When you pay people more,
(12:53):
those if we call them, lower level jobs, become more
attractive to workers. They stay longer, which means although they're
paying the workers more, they are spending less money on
recruitment and training and turnover and so in fact, in
(13:15):
many cases, a raise in the minimum wage pays for itself.
So that's the situation anyway, with the twenty dollars an
hour fast food. It did not lead to a job ageddin.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Okay, China. That's it. Let's get some news from Michael Monks. No.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
For a long time, the FBI has been warning about
Chinese infiltration in the United States.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Now we all know, everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
There's some level of Chinese spying, and we think about
it a lot in terms of there is steal our
military secrets or hack into our high level computer networks.
But also and the specific thing the FBI has been
warning about four years is infiltration of by people working
(14:13):
on behalf of China into local politics cities and counties
which we normally don't.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Think of China.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Why would China want to bother with, for example, the
Arcadia City Council. Well, let's find out, because the endoment
has delivered by prosecutors, and this indictment says that a
guy was trying to work on behalf of electing a
(14:47):
particular person to the Arcadia City Council and the crime
would be, you know, being an illegal agent of a
foreign power. You can't do that. Now I'm torn about
saying who they think the council person is, but it
(15:08):
has been published in the La Times. So I guess
I'm just telling you that the La Times is saying
that the person who was being helped is Arcadia City
council person Eileen Wang. I also want to make very
very clear she's not been charged with any crime, and
(15:29):
it's not even clear if she knew of this guy's
ties to China. So it is entirely possible that Eileen
Wang is a completely innocent person.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Targeted though because of.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Perhaps some connections to people who are supportive of China,
or possibly some sincerely held beliefs that are pro China,
but did not know that someone acting as a foreign
agent of China was helping her get elected. So that
that having been said, which I don't say is just
(16:10):
a throwaway, it's really important that right now she not
be villainized. However, the idea was that the guy who's
been indicted, Mike Son, was putting together dossiers of who who.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Did Eileen Wang know?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
What connections did she have that might be useful. Maybe
it's not Eileen Wang that's useful to China at all,
but maybe it's somebody that she knows and that would
make her a valuable person to get into a position
of power, because she simply knows people who would be
of assistance to China. Because that's the strategy here, get
(16:54):
in at the grassroots. We can all, we can all
understand going after a senate, going after a high placed
FBI agent, going after a huge, huge businessman. But the
other approach is to go in at the local level,
people who seemingly couldn't possibly be worth bothering with, except
(17:14):
number one, they may know people, and number two, they
may go on to be a big fish someday. Maybe
you're a city council person today, but then maybe you're
a state senator, and then maybe you're a governor, and
then maybe you're in the United States Senate. And what
(17:38):
it shows is the long, the long con the long
strategy of the Chinese government to infiltrate here in order
to get influence in place for their purposes. They're thinking,
they're not only trying now for now, they're trying now.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
For much much later.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And the FBI knows it, and they they've been warning everybody,
and it seems like we're playing catch up. All right,
ladies and gentlemen, you are allowed to have a digital
license plate in California, and a couple of other states,
and you can display fun little messages around the edge
of it. And somebody's already hacked it in a heinous way.
(18:20):
Let's find out what he did in a segment we're
calling hacked.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Every name, every sett all right. Joseph Rodriguez is his name.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
He's a researcher with IOActive, which is a security firm.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
And here's what he did.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So these digital license plates are sold by a company
called Reviver. You put them on your car, and as
I said, you know how you can put a frame
around your license plate from your car dealership or something
that says, you know, eat, pray, love, or my other
car is a thing whatever. So with these you can
(19:05):
do it electronically and change it at will. And that's
I guess what people like about it, all right. So
here's what he did. So he got one of these things,
and there's a sticker on the back of it, and
you take the sticker off and it reveals some connectors,
and he put a cable on the connectors and he
was able to rewrite the firmware of this license plate
(19:28):
in a few minutes. And now with this new basically
operating system installed, he can control the license plate from
an app over bluetooth and change the entire thing to
show anything he wants. So the idea is, hey, man,
(19:48):
you want to go one hundred miles an hour through
a speed trap, Well just change your license plate number
to something else. And you could change your license plate
number two. I mean, I guess you could have it
say like, UH, can't get me. I don't know, it's
probably too many letters, but you get my point. But
here's the thing. Here's why you should be concerned about
(20:10):
this idea of somebody being able to change their digital
license plate to another license plate number is if they
change it to yours, guess who gets the tickets for
blowing through the toll booths. Guess who gets the speeding
tickets from the speed cameras you get them. Nobody wants
(20:30):
that this also could be done maliciously on purpose. I
mean you could, like, somebody could say I'm going to
change my license plate number so I can speed in
evague tolls and they happen to pick yours unwittingly. Or
maybe you got a neighbor who doesn't like you and
they've got one of them and they're like, you know what,
I'm going to change my license plate number that guy's
(20:51):
license plate and go out and purposefully run through tollbooths
and speed through cameras. I would not panic about this
just yet. There are some caveats here. It obviously has
been done, however, couple of things. First of all, in
order to get this firmware into this license plate, what
(21:16):
he had to do is put some wires on a
chip inside the plate and then monitor the voltage of
the plate and then purposefully cause a glitch on the
voltage at an exact moment to turn off the security
features of the license plate so that he could rewrite
(21:39):
the firmware. Now, once the firmware's in, then anybody can
use the app and do it. But the it's you know,
have you ever I don't know how many of you
have ever jail broken your iPhone, but it's kind of
like that, except there's a first step that's even more complicated. Also,
(22:02):
you have to have physical access to the car and
the license plate, and you have to take the license
plate off the car. And these license plates have a
feature that will alert the owner if they are removed
from the car, So you also would have to roll
up on your victim and jam the radio transmissions from
(22:25):
the license plate in order to do the thing so
that it doesn't tell the owner.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
That you've taken the license plate off. So in practical.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
In reality, this is unlikely to happen to anybody.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
He did it in a lab where.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
He didn't have to worry about the owner being alerted
that the license plate was taken off the vehicle, for example.
But just the fact that somebody thought to do it
and figured out how to do it means someday it
(23:04):
may become easier to do it. There. Already was another
security researcher two years ago who he didn't hack the
digital license plate, but he hacked the company's website, so
he was able to make himself an administrator and change
(23:24):
license plates that way. Now Reviver was able to patch that,
so nobody's going to be able to do that again.
But the problem with this new hack is you can't
fix it remotely or by updating the firmware because the
vulnerability is in the chip itself. So unless you get
(23:45):
an unless they patch the chip and then give everybody
new license plates, theoretically the license plate is vulnerable, but
it's not that vulnerable because look at all the rigamarole.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You got to go through to hack.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
It KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
If there is OKF I AM six forty live everywhere
on the iHeart Radio app, It's the Bill Handle Show.
Wayne Resnik in for Bill. Some of the stories we're
following for you here at KFI. La County health officials
say they have identified the first human case of bird
flu in La County. The person who has it has
(00:29):
mild symptoms. They are recovering at home. They're giving them
some anti virals, so it's not it's not a super
emergency situation for that person, thank goodness.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They also say this.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Person got the bird flu from livestock at his work
site that had the bird flu. It is jumping from
animals to people, folks. I don't know if it's panic
time yet.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
It's not panic time yet. Also, high surf also not
panic time. High surf warnings hiatt surf advisories in effect
all along the coast Ventura down through Orange County. The
National Weather Service says you're gonna see waves as high
as twelve feet at the beaches in La and OC
(01:12):
and up in Ventura. Oh boy, eighteen feet. Some waves
may hit that height that is too high to be
around in my opinion.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
But no need to panic.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Just don't go to the beach or even just stay
you know, stay away from where.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
The water's crashing on the shore. That's all.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Now, everybody loves money, and when a business sees an
opportunity to make a lot of money, they get very
excited and they start making plans to make all of
that wonderful money. And in this case, the business is
the private prison industry. And the reason that they believe
(01:56):
that they're going to start to make a lot of
money is because we have a new administration coming in
in January and the President elect, Donald Trump has said
he is going to undertake mass deportations, and mass deportations
means big money for private prisons because the Feds have
(02:17):
to put him somewhere until they deport them. Now, it
is true that this is something Donald Trump said before
his first term that he was going to deport tons
of people, and he did deport I mean, he didn't
do it, but you know what I'm saying. Under his administration,
they deported about nine hundred and thirty nine hundred and
forty thousand people less than under the Obama administration, Although,
(02:43):
and I'm not going to lie to you, I can't
figure out if these numbers reflect a four year term
for Obama or all eight years, because it would not
be fair to take eight years of one president and
compare it to four years of another president. But in
any event, it is it is low more than the
net number of Obama deportations, but way more than the
(03:05):
current president.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
And so.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Even if it doesn't reach the numbers that President elect
Trump is thinking about right now, it will likely be
an increase over what we've been seeing, and that means
more business for the big private prison companies like Geo Group,
which runs a bunch of private detention facilities all over
(03:32):
the place, and they had an earnings call recently where
the executive chairman of the Geo Group said that this
was an unprecedented opportunity.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And that they are gearing up.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
They are bringing beds online that currently are not, they
are looking at hiring a lot more staff. I wouldn't
be surprised if for the next couple three years, private
prison work becomes an employment growth industry. And they're not
the only one. There are other companies that do this.
(04:07):
I think Geo is probably the big daddy. I mean
they currently right now they're holding forty percent of all
ICE detainees, so they don't have a majority market share,
but they may have a plurality market share. They say
they already have enough empty beds that they could spin
(04:27):
up services there and bump up the number of people
that they hold in custody, and that this could lead
to over four hundred million dollars in additional annual revenues. Also,
GEO owns a company called BI Incorporated.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
I worked with not four. I worked with BI.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Briefly for a time a long time ago when they
were starting the first electronic monitoring unit here in Los
Angeles under the federal courts, and I worked on that unit,
and we contracted with BI for services. They they hold
a contract for the electronic monitoring of people awaiting court dates.
(05:14):
So GEO has their hands in keeping people in prisoned
pending deportation. They also have their hand in monitoring people
who are waiting for court dates to find out if
they're going to be deported or they're going to get
to stay, or if they're going to get a green
card or whatever's going to happen. So they really there's
(05:36):
a lot of money for them to make. There's some
other companies that are very excited, like core Civic is
the other It's like Coke and Pepsi. I think Geo
is Coke, core Civic is Pepsi. In the world of
private prisons, they're saying essentially the same thing. We have
unused beds that we can bring online very quickly. We
can hire more people pretty quickly. And I guess to
(05:59):
show that he is serious about doing this, President elect
Trump has said he will issue emergency orders that will
allow these private prison operators to hire people more quickly,
speed up the background check process because right now it
can take up to six months, and also to streamline
(06:20):
the normal competitive bidding process for these contracts. So they're
gonna do it, They're gonna do it quickly, and those
people are gonna get rich, no doubt.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
All Right, let's talk about it.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
We've been living with the twenty dollars an hour fast
food worker minimum wage in California. So let's see how
many jobs were killed and lost since that went into effect.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Hi, will can you hear me typing? Actually there are.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
There are more jobs in the fast food industry in
California since the twenty dollars an hour minimum wage passed.
I remember, and you probably remember, and if you were
listening to KFI, it was talked about a lot. When
that law was signed Abe twelve twenty eight. There were
stories of gloom and doom for the industry. For example,
(07:20):
you may remember a franchisee of Pizza Hut, a group
that owned one hundred They still do own hundreds of
Pizza Hut locations. They said, we will lay off every
single one of our in house delivery drivers because of this.
There was a guy who owned like one hundred and
(07:40):
twenty or something Burger Kings. He said, I'm gonna have
to cut everybody's hours and I'm gonna have to start
putting in more of those self service kiosks because of this.
Rubios they said, we're gonna have to close like fifty
stores because of the rising cost of doing business in California.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Now in Rubio's is an.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Interesting case because at the time that they said that
that we're gonna have to close forty five fifty stores
because of the rising cost of doing business in California,
their biggest expense was their debt payments. Because they were
acquired by private equity firm. Private equity is almost always evil,
(08:27):
so that's a little disingenuous, but nonetheless that was the
tone of the news coverage in the wake of the
passage of the twenty dollars an hour fast food minimum wage.
Then it went into effect and in April, I believe,
and then after it went into effect, this group called
(08:53):
the California Business and Industrial Alliance, they took out an
ad in USA Today Full paid saying we've lost ten
thousand jobs. Okay, I was actually they actually they put
(09:15):
out that ad right after the beginning of a normal
yearly cycle for fast food jobs. The fact of the
matter is fast food jobs are seasonal, and jobs go
away starting around June. They go away again right around now,
(09:42):
and then they come back and that has happened.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
That happens over and over. It's a cycle.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
So if you use raw numbers you can get a
misleading result. If you use seasonally adjusted numbers. During this period,
actually five thousand jobs were gained. Now, the Hoover Institution,
which is a think tank, they're very free market, so.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
They don't like minimum wages.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
They say they looked at unemployment data starting from when
the law was signed through the end of the year
and that a bunch of jobs went away. But then
it was pointed out that they were not using seasonally
adjusted numbers, and they and this is why I bring
this up, because it's one thing for me to say
(10:37):
they said ten thousand jobs went away, but that wasn't true.
But it's another thing when they retracted their post and
admitted that they blew it. So even they ended up saying, oh, yeah,
we didn't do it the right way, the fair way.
(10:59):
Then came another group called the Employment Policies Institute, which
happens to be run by a guy who's a big
lobbyist for the restaurant industry, who said, hey, let's look
at January twenty twenty four and see what happens with
employment because of this law. And oh, jobs went down.
(11:22):
But remember I just told you there's a seasonal cycle
in place. If that person had picked September of twenty
twenty three, when the law was signed, for example, to
then look, or if they had picked April of this
year when it took effect, guess what, then it would
have shown that jobs had gone up. So you can
pick and choose obviously, how to put out information to
(11:46):
have it to have it put forth the conclusion that
you want, but that doesn't mean that your conclusion is
really the fair or accurate one. So is there some
way to know for sure what raising the minimum wage
does to jobs? Not really, because it's actually very complicated.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
You know a lot of economists go.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Who's just beth. If you raise the wage, you gotta
pay people. You can't afford to have as many people
who are But here's the thing. If you look at
all of the studies that have been done in the aggregate,
what you find is an increase in the minimum wage
(12:29):
doesn't really have much of an effect. In some cases
there is some job loss, but it's not catastrophic. In
other cases, jobs go up. How can this even be
if it's such simple math. Well, because there's a flip
side to paying people more. When you pay people more,
(12:53):
those if we call them, lower level jobs, become more
attractive to workers. They stay longer, which means although they're
paying the workers more, they are spending less money on
recruitment and training and turnover and so in fact, in
(13:15):
many cases, a raise in the minimum wage pays for itself.
So that's the situation anyway, with the twenty dollars an
hour fast food. It did not lead to a job ageddin.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Okay, China. That's it. Let's get some news from Michael Monks. No.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
For a long time, the FBI has been warning about
Chinese infiltration in the United States.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Now we all know, everybody knows.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
There's some level of Chinese spying, and we think about
it a lot in terms of there is steal our
military secrets or hack into our high level computer networks.
But also and the specific thing the FBI has been
warning about four years is infiltration of by people working
(14:13):
on behalf of China into local politics cities and counties
which we normally don't.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Think of China.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Why would China want to bother with, for example, the
Arcadia City Council. Well, let's find out, because the endoment
has delivered by prosecutors, and this indictment says that a
guy was trying to work on behalf of electing a
(14:47):
particular person to the Arcadia City Council and the crime
would be, you know, being an illegal agent of a
foreign power. You can't do that. Now I'm torn about
saying who they think the council person is, but it
(15:08):
has been published in the La Times. So I guess
I'm just telling you that the La Times is saying
that the person who was being helped is Arcadia City
council person Eileen Wang. I also want to make very
very clear she's not been charged with any crime, and
(15:29):
it's not even clear if she knew of this guy's
ties to China. So it is entirely possible that Eileen
Wang is a completely innocent person.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Targeted though because of.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Perhaps some connections to people who are supportive of China,
or possibly some sincerely held beliefs that are pro China,
but did not know that someone acting as a foreign
agent of China was helping her get elected. So that
that having been said, which I don't say is just
(16:10):
a throwaway, it's really important that right now she not
be villainized. However, the idea was that the guy who's
been indicted, Mike Son, was putting together dossiers of who who.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Did Eileen Wang know?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
What connections did she have that might be useful. Maybe
it's not Eileen Wang that's useful to China at all,
but maybe it's somebody that she knows and that would
make her a valuable person to get into a position
of power, because she simply knows people who would be
of assistance to China. Because that's the strategy here, get
(16:54):
in at the grassroots. We can all, we can all
understand going after a senate, going after a high placed
FBI agent, going after a huge, huge businessman. But the
other approach is to go in at the local level,
people who seemingly couldn't possibly be worth bothering with, except
(17:14):
number one, they may know people, and number two, they
may go on to be a big fish someday. Maybe
you're a city council person today, but then maybe you're
a state senator, and then maybe you're a governor, and
then maybe you're in the United States Senate. And what
(17:38):
it shows is the long, the long con the long
strategy of the Chinese government to infiltrate here in order
to get influence in place for their purposes. They're thinking,
they're not only trying now for now, they're trying now.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
For much much later.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And the FBI knows it, and they they've been warning everybody,
and it seems like we're playing catch up. All right,
ladies and gentlemen, you are allowed to have a digital
license plate in California, and a couple of other states,
and you can display fun little messages around the edge
of it. And somebody's already hacked it in a heinous way.
(18:20):
Let's find out what he did in a segment we're
calling hacked.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Every name, every sett all right. Joseph Rodriguez is his name.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
He's a researcher with IOActive, which is a security firm.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
And here's what he did.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So these digital license plates are sold by a company
called Reviver. You put them on your car, and as
I said, you know how you can put a frame
around your license plate from your car dealership or something
that says, you know, eat, pray, love, or my other
car is a thing whatever. So with these you can
(19:05):
do it electronically and change it at will. And that's
I guess what people like about it, all right. So
here's what he did. So he got one of these things,
and there's a sticker on the back of it, and
you take the sticker off and it reveals some connectors,
and he put a cable on the connectors and he
was able to rewrite the firmware of this license plate
(19:28):
in a few minutes. And now with this new basically
operating system installed, he can control the license plate from
an app over bluetooth and change the entire thing to
show anything he wants. So the idea is, hey, man,
(19:48):
you want to go one hundred miles an hour through
a speed trap, Well just change your license plate number
to something else. And you could change your license plate
number two. I mean, I guess you could have it
say like, UH, can't get me. I don't know, it's
probably too many letters, but you get my point. But
here's the thing. Here's why you should be concerned about
(20:10):
this idea of somebody being able to change their digital
license plate to another license plate number is if they
change it to yours, guess who gets the tickets for
blowing through the toll booths. Guess who gets the speeding
tickets from the speed cameras you get them. Nobody wants
(20:30):
that this also could be done maliciously on purpose. I
mean you could, like, somebody could say I'm going to
change my license plate number so I can speed in
evague tolls and they happen to pick yours unwittingly. Or
maybe you got a neighbor who doesn't like you and
they've got one of them and they're like, you know what,
I'm going to change my license plate number that guy's
(20:51):
license plate and go out and purposefully run through tollbooths
and speed through cameras. I would not panic about this
just yet. There are some caveats here. It obviously has
been done, however, couple of things. First of all, in
order to get this firmware into this license plate, what
(21:16):
he had to do is put some wires on a
chip inside the plate and then monitor the voltage of
the plate and then purposefully cause a glitch on the
voltage at an exact moment to turn off the security
features of the license plate so that he could rewrite
(21:39):
the firmware. Now, once the firmware's in, then anybody can
use the app and do it. But the it's you know,
have you ever I don't know how many of you
have ever jail broken your iPhone, but it's kind of
like that, except there's a first step that's even more complicated. Also,
(22:02):
you have to have physical access to the car and
the license plate, and you have to take the license
plate off the car. And these license plates have a
feature that will alert the owner if they are removed
from the car, So you also would have to roll
up on your victim and jam the radio transmissions from
(22:25):
the license plate in order to do the thing so
that it doesn't tell the owner.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
That you've taken the license plate off. So in practical.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
In reality, this is unlikely to happen to anybody.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
He did it in a lab where.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
He didn't have to worry about the owner being alerted
that the license plate was taken off the vehicle, for example.
But just the fact that somebody thought to do it
and figured out how to do it means someday it
(23:04):
may become easier to do it. There. Already was another
security researcher two years ago who he didn't hack the
digital license plate, but he hacked the company's website, so
he was able to make himself an administrator and change
(23:24):
license plates that way. Now Reviver was able to patch that,
so nobody's going to be able to do that again.
But the problem with this new hack is you can't
fix it remotely or by updating the firmware because the
vulnerability is in the chip itself. So unless you get
(23:45):
an unless they patch the chip and then give everybody
new license plates, theoretically the license plate is vulnerable, but
it's not that vulnerable because look at all the rigamarole.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You got to go through to hack.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
It KFI AM six forty Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
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